Two Years, Not Two Months: What Executors Don’t Expect
When Kaveh’s father died, the lawyer read through the will and confirmed what Kaveh already half expected. His father had named him executor. His sister looked across the table and said, “Well, you’re better with paperwork than I am.”
Kaveh didn’t ask for the role and neither did she. Their father had made that decision years earlier, on his own, when he wrote the will. But Kaveh had a choice about whether to accept it, and once he did, he pictured a few months of forms, maybe a trip to the bank, a lawyer’s office visit or two. He figured he’d have the estate wrapped up by the time the leaves turned that fall.
Eighteen months later, he was still waiting on a letter from the CRA.
Kaveh isn’t unusual. Most people who agree to be an executor have never done it before, and almost nothing in the way the role gets offered prepares them for how long it actually takes. “Can you look after things” sounds like a weekend project. It’s closer to a part-time job that runs for a year, sometimes two or more, with long stretches where the only thing to do is wait.
Why “a few months” is almost never right
A simple, uncontested estate with a clear will, cooperative beneficiaries, and no property to sell can sometimes close in under a year. That’s the fast case. For most estates, twelve to eighteen months is a more honest estimate, and complicated ones, foreign assets, a business, a disputed will, a property that won’t sell, can stretch to two or three years. Sometimes even longer!
The reason has nothing to do with how hard the executor works. It has to do with how many separate government and institutional processes have to run their course, mostly one after another rather than all at once, before an estate can legally close.
A snapshot of the calendar
Weeks 1 to 8: getting the will into probate. Before an executor can do much of anything, banks and land registries usually want proof of legal authority. In Alberta, that’s a Grant of Probate from the Surrogate Court. Other provinces call it something else; a Certificate of Appointment of Estate Trustee in Ontario, for example, but the function is the same everywhere: the court confirming the executor is who they say they are. Filing the application itself can take a few weeks to prepare properly. Court processing on top of that typically runs six to eight weeks for a clean, uncomplicated application, though busier courts in bigger cities regularly take four to six months longer.
Months 2 to 6: the busiest stretch. Executors don’t wait for probate to start working. Securing the estate’s assets, locking up a house, insuring valuables, safeguarding accounts, has to happen right away, before any grant is issued. Beneficiaries are also often notified before probate is granted, since notice requirements are usually built into the application itself. Once probate is granted, the executor gains full authority to open estate accounts, deal directly with financial institutions, and move ahead on locating and valuing assets and settling debts. This is usually the busiest period, and also the one people expect the whole process to look like. It doesn’t stay this way.
Around month 6 to 12: the final tax return and the waiting begins. The deceased’s terminal tax return has to be filed, generally by April 30 of the following year or six months after death, whichever is later. Once that return is assessed and the Notice of Assessment arrives, the executor can apply to the CRA for a Clearance Certificate. This is where most timelines run into trouble.
Months 6 to 12+ on top of everything else: the CRA Clearance Certificate. The certificate can’t even be requested until the Notice of Assessment is in hand, so this step doesn’t start until the tax filing above is fully completed. From there, the CRA’s own published standard is 120 days, about four months, to issue it once a complete request is received. In practice, that four-month clock only starts once every return has been filed, assessed, and any balance paid, and missing documents or an audit add time on top of it. According to the CRA website, even the standard itself only gets met about 80% of the time, so that means 20% of the applications, complete and clean or not, take longer than four months. The estate legally cannot close, and in most cases the executor cannot distribute the remaining assets, until this certificate is in hand. An executor who distributes early can become personally liable for any tax the CRA later finds owing.
Along the way: property, and the beneficiaries who are waiting. If the estate includes a house or vacation property, selling it adds its own timeline: listing, offers, closing, none of which happens on the executor’s schedule. Many provinces also require executors to wait, often around six months from probate, before final distribution, to give anyone with a claim against the estate time to come forward. Executors who distribute early to keep beneficiaries happy take on that risk personally.
When Kaveh Called the CRA
Seventeen months in, Kaveh called the CRA to check on his clearance certificate request. He’d filed it nine months earlier, once the terminal tax return was finally assessed, and assumed it was close by then. The agent told him the file was still in queue, and that a missing signature page on one of the original submissions had reset part of the clock. He resubmitted, and waited several more months. His sister asked him, more than once, why it was taking so long. He didn’t have a good answer, because nobody had told him what “long” actually meant when he said yes.
What actually causes the delays
A few things show up again and again:
- Incomplete or unassessed tax filings when the clearance certificate request goes in, which stalls it before the CRA’s own clock even starts
- Property that takes longer to sell than expected, or that beneficiaries disagree about keeping versus selling
- Missing or hard-to-locate beneficiaries, especially in blended families or when someone has lost touch with relatives
- Court backlogs in larger cities, where probate that should take six to eight weeks can take four to six months
- Executors distributing informally before the clearance certificate arrives, then having to unwind it
None of these are unusual. They’re the ordinary texture of settling almost any estate, and they’re precisely what most people have never been told to expect.
If you’ve been named executor, or you’re already partway through the role, having a clear picture of what’s ahead, and what to watch for, changes how the whole process feels. Executor’s Compass™ walks through each stage of estate administration in order, with the milestones and warning signs built in, so you’re never guessing what comes next or how long it’s reasonable to wait. The Executor’s Compass™ Suite builds on that with a timeline you can track against your own estate and the tools to manage the passing of accounts and final distribution once you get there. If you haven’t said yes yet, Before You Say Yes™ is worth going through first. It’s built specifically to help you understand what you’re agreeing to before you agree to it.
Kaveh got through it. The estate closed just past the two-year mark, and looking back, he says the hardest part wasn’t any single task. It was not knowing, for months at a time, whether the silence meant something had gone wrong or whether it just meant he had to wait. If you’re in that silence right now, it probably just means you have to wait. That’s worth knowing on its own.
Visit our services page to see how we can help.
Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:
Prefer a podcast? Listen here!
Please send us your questions or share your comments.
Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.
